A new website is a marathon, not a sprint

There’s this satisfying adrenaline rush you get when your website goes live.

You proudly scroll through each pixel, update your social media and bring it up in conversation and emails.

The satisfaction isn’t just because you have a new shop window that makes you look sleek and modern and in tune with your audience.

It’s because the process of putting together a new website requires you to think deeply about your customers, your purpose as an organisation and how you segment and sell your products and services.

In other words, your organisation has a more cogent vision and targeted marketing approach because you’ve gone through the exercise of updating your website.

So we’re back to the well-deserved adrenaline rush.

But then a problem slowly manifests itself.

Your website is beautiful and useable and mobile friendly and customer centric. In short, it is a technical and creative work of art. But those customers it’s so focused on aren’t dropping by en masse. Even the search terms you’ve so carefully identified are prioritising competitors with an inferior, less relevant offering.

Does this mean your website project has failed?

Definitely not.

Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day worldwide. When you’re looking at that volume of web traffic, it’s never going to be a case of ‘build it and they will come.’

You need to make your website work for you.

Think of it this way. If you printed a new brochure and left a stack outside your office door, would you expect prospects to come in droves to pick up a copy? No. The brochure is part of your sales toolkit and needs to be used and promoted in the right way. Your website is the same.

And this is where the title to this blog post comes in.

If you stop thinking about your website after that adrenaline rush subsides, you’ve sprinted off the start and quit before you’ve finished the 26.2 mile course.